God’s New Language

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. —Acts 2:1–4

The kingdom Jesus inaugurated advances through the outpouring of the Spirit. The life, death, and resurrection of Christ was not the completion of God’s promise to Israel. Thus, after his death Jesus told his followers to wait in Jerusalem so that the promise would become fully realized. Pentecost is the climax of the Christian year, as only with it can we tell the whole story of God’s redemption.

But Pentecost is also the beginning. Christ is the living Lord. He is not absent in some far-off spiritual realm. A new era has begun, a new creation is born. All is finally summed up through God’s new creation of the church. The mighty wind that gave birth to the church at Pentecost, however, involves the affairs of nations and empires. That wind, that Spirit, created a new nation that was no longer subject to the constraints of the past and the boundaries that keep us apart. God’s salvation is the creation of a new society that invites each person to become part of a new age that the nations of this world cannot provide.

Mosaic of the Holy Spirit descending at Pentecost. Image by Holger Schué, via Pixabay.

At Pentecost God undid what was done at Babel. In Genesis 11 we are told that originally the whole earth had one language, that there was unusual cooperativeness as people migrated together seeking a good place to live. Finding the land of Shinar, they discovered how to make bricks and become builders. Their inventiveness, however, turned wayward. They used their creative gifts to live as if they did not need to acknowledge that their existence depends on gifts. Thus the people said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad on the face of the earth.” And God feared that they would now think that nothing they proposed would be impossible.

So God confused their language, and scattered them across the earth into isolated homes, lands, and histories, no longer able to cooperate. This scattering was actually meant as a gift. By being divided, by having to face the otherness created by the separateness of language and place, people were given the resources necessary to recognize their limitations, their status as creatures. God’s judgment was the grace necessary to relearn the humility that ennobles.

But our forebears refused to accept this gift and instead used their separateness as a club, hoping to force all peoples to speak their tribe’s language. Thus, at Babel war was born, as fear of the other became the overriding passion that motivated each group to force others to become part of their story or face annihilation. The killing begun by Cain was now magnified. Humans would destroy the other even if it meant their own deaths. Our histories, therefore, have become the history of conflict, conquest, and war as we count our days by the battles of the past.

It is only against the background of Babel that we can understand the extraordinary event of Pentecost. The sound that was like the rush of a mighty wind signaled a new creation. The fire of the Holy Spirit burned clean, making possible a new understanding. The Jews of the diaspora heard in their own languages these Galilean followers of Jesus telling of the mighty works of God. God’s people themselves, who had been scattered among the tribes, learning their languages, were now reunited in common understanding. The wound of Babel began to be healed among the very people appointed to be a pledge of God’s presence.

The joy of that healing surely must have made them ecstatic. It is literally a joy not possible except by God’s creation. It is a joy that comes from recognizing that we have been freed from our endless cycles of conflict, injury, and revenge. It is the joy of unity that we experience all too briefly in moments of self-forgetfulness. It is no wonder, therefore, that some onlookers simply attributed this strange behavior to the consumption of potent wine.

The Spirit, to be sure, is a wild and powerful presence that creates a new people where there was no people, but it is a Spirit that the earliest believers knew, and we know. For the work the Spirit does is not different from the work that was done in Jesus of Nazareth, the harbinger of God’s rule and reign. In John’s Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples that he must go so that the Counselor, the Spirit of truth, might be present to bear witness to him (John 16:5–16). The witness that the Spirit makes to Jesus transforms the witness of the disciples, as they are now able to see what they have seen from the beginning but not really seen at all.

The unity of humankind prefigured at Pentecost is not just any unity but a unity made possible by the apocalyptic work of Jesus of Nazareth. It is a unity that breaks down barriers and draws people together, a unity of renewed understanding, but the kind of understanding not created by some artificial Esperanto that denies the reality of other languages. Attempts to secure community through the creation of a single language, not to mention a single political or technological system, are attempts to make us forget our histories and differences rather than find the unity made possible by the Spirit through which we understand the other as other. At Pentecost God created a new language, but it is an embodied language of care. It is a baptism of fire through which we enter a community whose memory of its Savior creates the miracle of being a people whose very differences contribute to their unity and love for one another.

We call this new creation church. She is constituted by word and sacrament, as the story we tell must not only be told but also enacted and embodied. In the telling, we are challenged to be a people capable of hearing and obeying God’s good news, a people that in its life together bears witness to God’s reconciling work.

To be faithful to God’s gift at Pentecost, therefore, the church cannot avoid calling attention to herself. Christ’s disciples have a story to tell in which God in Christ is the main character. They cannot tell that story without becoming part of the tale. For God’s story in Christ is not just another possible story about the way the world is; it is the story of the world as created and redeemed by God.

That story cannot be told rightly unless it includes the church as God’s creation to heal our separateness. For what God did at Pentecost he continues to do; God renews and sustains the presence of the church so that the world might know there is an alternative to Babel. We really do have an alternative to Babel, an alternative to confusion, an alternative to fear of one another, and finally to war. We don’t just have an alternative story, but insofar as we are the church, we are the alternative. We are God’s new language.

From Jesus Changes Everything: A New World Made Possible.